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There Will Be Blood

‘Manson,’ a Biography by Jeff Guinn

I’ve never met Charles Manson, although I did meet one of his former cellmates in the late 1980s, at an ill-­begotten writers’ conference on the Oregon coast. He was the protégé of an elderly and naïve writing coach, and he leapt from her car, heading straight for me, probably because I was the only true-crime writer there. He waved a creased note and shouted: “Charlie gave this to me! See — there’s his signature. I know Charlie Manson personally!”

I didn’t find out if the ex-con had any talent with words, but we were all warned he shouldn’t have alcohol. To no avail. Intoxicated, he became a menace, skulking around the beach lodge, trying bedroom doors. My best friend retrieved two axes from near the communal fireplace, and we hid them under our beds after we blocked the door.

During the night, Manson’s friend attacked a young male poet who was sleeping in a main room without doors. My friend and I didn’t stick around for the aftermath, but tiptoed to our car at dawn. We checked the media for the next 36 hours, expecting to see coverage: “Mass Murderer Wipes Out Writing Hopefuls.” Thank God, it didn’t happen. Deputies arrived in time to handcuff the madman.

Even from behind bars, it seemed, Manson inspired disaster.

Those of us who remember Aug. 9, 1969, find it hard to believe that 44 years have passed since Manson and members of his brainwashed “Family” undertook their grisly killing spree in Los Angeles. Seeking an alibi for one of Manson’s “connections” (who had been charged with murder in the stabbing of a drug-dealing music teacher named Gary Hinman), Manson’s ragtag band of devotees savaged both the famous and the unknown in what they framed as “copycat killings.” As Jeff Guinn writes in “Manson,” his 500-page tour de force of a biography: “Of course they had certain people in mind, important people, celebrities whose deaths would command headlines. . . . That way the police couldn’t help but believe Hinman’s killers were still out there committing murders.”

The hugely pregnant actress Sharon Tate, her unborn son and houseguests staying at a home on Cielo Drive — Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger and Voytek Frykowski — died there. Another victim, Steve Parent, who had stopped by to see the property’s caretaker, was shot to death in his car. Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, ordinary upper-middle-class citizens, were slaughtered the next night, more victims of Manson’s evil plans. Probably no one will ever know for sure how many people were killed because of Manson.

Like most Americans born before 1955, I recall vividly where I was when John and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, and when the Challenger exploded just after liftoff. The massacre on Cielo Drive similarly remains with me. The bombardment of updates that followed for years, and the prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s book “Helter Skelter” (written with Curt Gentry), led me to believe there was nothing more to learn about the grubby little man with the swastika cut into his forehead.

I was wrong.

Bugliosi and Gentry wrote an outstanding book about the murder investigations, the turf wars between the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office, the legal maneuverings and the seemingly endless trials. But Guinn’s “Manson” explores a different angle.

Photo

Charles Manson, at about age 5, with a cousin and his maternal grandmother.Credit
Jo Ann Collection

A great deal of the story of Manson’s roots has been apocryphal. Guinn’s research, which turned up family members never before interviewed, along with individuals Manson related to intensely or only peripherally, attempts to set the record straight.

Guinn follows Manson from his childhood through his teenage years and then concentrates on the vicious Svengali he became. While no one would say Manson’s boyhood was anywhere close to ideal, Guinn shows he was never truly abandoned. When his mother, Kathleen, went to prison, relatives took him in. Nancy Maddox, his churchgoing grandmother, fretted over the way he turned out. So did Kathleen, who moved to Washington from California so she could be close to him when he was serving time at the penitentiary on McNeil Island. “Though she knew Charlie deserved to be in prison,” Guinn writes, “her heart still ached for him. Kathleen found work as a waitress” and “reflected even more on all the mistakes she had made with Charlie; if she’d been a better mother, he surely wouldn’t have turned out the way that he did.”

Manson scored 109 on one prison I.Q. test, when he was 16, and 121 on another a few years later. The first result is slightly above average; the second is said to be in the “high normal” range. Guinn doesn’t identify which tests were given. Was Manson brilliant, as some have claimed? Probably not. He cobbled together his pseudophilosophy by studying Dale Carnegie and L. Ron Hubbard. He had no sense of how to adjust his conduct, grooming habits or conversation when dealing with the Hollywood producers who might have helped him to realize his absolute goal: to become a rock star more famous than the Beatles. He had no clue how to self-censor, shooting himself in the foot over and over. Even so, he proved to be spellbinding to the vulnerable.

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How he targeted likely candidates for brainwashing is a classic study of human behavior. Guinn lets us ride along on the ramshackle bus Manson drove and watch as he seeks converts. Like all serial killers, he zeroed in on weakness. His treatment of women was despicable yet fascinating. His plots were multidimensional and psychotic, but they worked for a very long time. He was quite comfortable playing “Jesus Christ.”

Manson wanted to be part of it all. Surprisingly, he wangled his way into the inner circle of one of the Beach Boys, captivating Dennis Wilson (who was awed by Manson’s “wisdom,” and his girls). He didn’t have friends; he had people he knew he could manipulate or take advantage of. He had the loyalty of a snake.

Guinn’s book is three-pronged: there’s the rise and fall of Manson; a thorough look at the 1960s music industry; and the bizarre ambience of the ’60s — Berkeley and the Haight-Ashbury, Los Angeles and the Spahn Ranch, the sprawling property where the Manson Family settled for a time.

Though most of the literate world knows what’s to come, Guinn ably maintains suspense. Even if “Manson” is occasionally tedious, recounting over and over the Family’s peripatetic adventures — garbage diving for food, stealing, “creepy-crawling” into people’s homes at night — it stands as a definitive work: important for students of criminology, human behavior, popular culture, music, psychopathology and sociopathology, and compulsively readable for anyone who relishes nonfiction.

Although it’s difficult to compare Manson to anyone in terms of psychopathy, Adolf Hitler seems most apt. Both men were megalomaniacs and completely amoral. Both were charming and terrifying, and ultimately failures.

As for the Family — their brains addled with drugs and Manson’s hypnotic pontificating — it’s easy to feel sad for them. Manson’s followers circled endlessly while becoming more alienated from society, poorer, hungrier and more desperate to reach the “bottomless pit” that would save them from “Helter Skelter.” Few of them sensed they had already experienced Helter Skelter, and his name was Charlie.

MANSON

The Life and Times of Charles Manson

By Jeff Guinn

Illustrated. 495 pp. Simon & Schuster. $27.50.

Ann Rule is the author of 34 books, most recently “Practice to Deceive,” to be published in October.

A version of this review appears in print on August 18, 2013, on Page BR14 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: There Will Be Blood. Today's Paper|Subscribe